Month: June 2014

I’m looking for fact based news articles with citations to source material… very light on the editorializing. As well, original investigative reporting and opinions are always welcome, but I’ll insist on good sources if it’s presented as fact.

I reserve the right to reject any work submitted, but I doubt I’ll ever remove anything. It would have to be some really crazy, grassy knoll, crop circling, truther type conspiracy stuff before I’ll remove it… So yeah, I’ll flat out reject conspiracy theory writing.

Oh, and this is not a paying gig… I just want to give people I know a chance to get real news out from a point of view that’s not my own.

Mars is very aptly nicknamed “The Red Planet.” Aside from some dry ice polar caps, the landscape on Mars is cold, dry, and rocky. However, that wasn’t always the case. Four billion years ago Mars was covered in water. It had a much thicker atmosphere that kept the planet warm enough for rivers to flow and for liquid water to stand. On November 18, NASA will be launching the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) which will try to determine what happened to the atmosphere on Mars.

What happened to the water of Mars is something I’ve wondered for many years. IFLS actually understates the nature of Mars ice caps; not only are they compose of dry ice, but there’s a significant amount of water ice contained in those ice caps.

But beyond that, I do have my own theory on what happened to Mar’s water and atmosphere.

Back a couple decades ago, I was looking at images and maps of Mars.

After staring at these maps for I don’t know how long, and I began to wonder if the reason the southern hemisphere was more cratered was because of elevation and water erosion, or was it because the planet had undergone more extensive bombardment in its southern hemisphere.

That got me to wondering, if Mars had undergone an intense bombardment of asteroids, could ever be enough kinetic energy in that to push large amounts of water and soil from Mars into orbit?

In other words, one or more asteroids hit Mars and the energy from that cast a large amount of Martian water, atmosphere and soil into orbit, and the Martian moons, Phobos and Deimos, were born from the leftovers.

Over the years, I’ve looked around to see if anyone else this this is possible. I have yet to read anything suggesting that, but one bit of information in support of my idea is that the Martian moon Phobos, is most likely comprised of a significant amount of water ice.

One day we’ll know for certain what happened to the water of Mars, but until then, it’s fun to speculate.

In a recently published study, the scientists say they found that when people saw fewer positive posts on their feeds, they produced fewer positive posts and instead wrote more negative posts, too. On the flip side, when scientists reduced the number of negative posts on a person’s newsfeed, those individuals became more positive themselves.

It is one of the oldest tenets of modernity: The state must establish a monopoly on violence before civil society can develop and politics can thrive. Read your Hobbes: “And covenants, without the sword, are but words and of no strength to secure a man at all.” Or read the Founders, who, in both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, argued that rights had to be secured before they could be exercised. Power precedes politics.

The founders of this nation understood the concept of real, physical power, the evils of a large burdensome government in using that power, and as a consequence the constitution is a set of rules for government not rules for citizens.

This lesson about power, is artfully demonstrated in a scene from Game of Thrones where Petyr Baelish and Cersei Lannister are conversing about a missing girl, and Petyr makes the assertion that knowledge is power…

This is something many seem to confuse. There are people who believe business is more powerful than the government, because business can buy off politicians. While that’s true, they forget the fact that business wouldn’t even bother buying off the politician if it weren’t for the governments monopoly on power.

Intense exercise changes the body and muscles at a molecular level in ways that milder physical activity doesn’t match, according to an enlightening new study. Though the study was conducted in mice, the findings add to growing scientific evidence that to realize the greatest benefits from workouts, we probably need to push ourselves.